New in: Cooke Panchro/i Classics

We are delighted to now stock a beautiful 7 way set of Cooke Panchro/i Classics. These are Cookes modern remake of the legendary S2/S3 vintage sets which have been popular for many years now. The growing demand for vintage Cooke Speed Panchro lenses from the 1920s to 1960s prompted Cooke to introduce a modern redesign of the vintage classic.

The vintage sets are rarely colour matched requiring more work for the camera department and more 'fixing' in the grade, and often have a yellow tint which comes from age. These modern remakes take these issues away, resulting in lenses which we know will shoot films and drama as well as commercials and music videos.

Hear it from Cooke themselves:

Our new Pancho, that is true to the original look of the now legendary Speed Panchro, recreates the same look and feel of the original with the advantage of modern glass mounted for today’s cameras. And, the new lenses come equipped with /i Technology for frame by frame digital information capture, as do all modern Cooke cine lenses for film and digital capture.

The original Cooke Speed Panchro, designed by Horace W. Lee in the 1920s, was a cine prime lens that chromatically enhanced an image when filming under restricted illumination. Cooke Speed Panchros combined a relative aperture as wide as f2.0 with an angular field of view and definition previously impossible with much smaller apertures. They quickly gained a worldwide reputation for quality cinema production and were widely used throughout the 20th century.

i/Technology

Our Cooke Panchro/i Classic lenses are supplied with /i Technology that collect detailed lens data for production, VFX and post-production teams and are designed for all PL mounted professional motion picture film and electronic cameras. The /i Technology provides cinematographers and camera operators with vital information on lens setting, focusing distance, aperture and depth-of-field, hyperfocal distance, serial number, owner data, lens type and focal length in both metric and footage measurements, as well as inertial tracking data, shading and distortion data. For zoom lenses, the zoom position is displayed.